Just Add Cheese and Sausage

In addition to the prosciutto, I decided to start 2 concurrent projects. The first is cheese. Almost a year ago I got a bunch of stuff for making cheese, only to grow discouraged over the tedious nature of cheese production. I decided to give it another try after finding this, a temperature probe that sits in a water bath and keeps the bath at a constant temperature. This makes it pretty easy to keep fussy cheese curds at a particular temperature for a long time. Thus, I took a swing at a recipe for farmhouse cheddar. It took me about 4 hours to make, and when I was done, the pressed cheese looked like this:

I then dunked it into a pot of brine, which is where the whole project sits right now. To me, the cheese still feels very wet. The saturated brine is sure to take some of this water out, but the cheese itself is still squishy.

The other project is more cured sausage, this time with soil moisture sensors to match the ones we’re using to monitor the prosciutto. Here’s what the scene in the fridge looks like now:

Making more sausage confirmed a simple fact about sausage-making: it’s disgusting. Working with all the stinky hog middles makes me wonder why I bother with them, but they have given us the best results in the past. This go around, I’m trying to grow lots of good mold, so I’m keeping the fridge humidity pretty high, and watching them closely. I’ll soon have some readings on the moisture to share, and I’m interested to watch the dry-down of the sausage over about a month or so.